poverty

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts.

n. Deficiency in amount; scantiness: "the poverty of feeling that reduced her soul” ( Scott Turow).

n. Unproductiveness; infertility: the poverty of the soil.

n. Renunciation made by a member of a religious order of the right to own property.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need.

n. Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or desired, or that constitute richness; as, poverty of soil; poverty of the blood; poverty of ideas.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. The quality or state of being poor or indigent; want or scarcity of means of subsistence; indigence; need.

n. Any deficiency of elements or resources that are needed or desired, or that constitute richness

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. The state or condition of being poor; need or scarcity of means of subsistence; needy circumstances; indigence; penury.

n. The quality of being poor; a lack of necessary or desirable elements, constituents, or qualities.

n. Lack of richness of tone; thinness (of sound).

n. Dearth; scantiness; small allowance.

n. Poor things; objects or productions of little value.

n. The poor; poor people collectively. Compare the quality, used for persons of quality.

n.Synonyms Poverty, Want, Indigence, Penury, Destitution, Pauperism, Need, neediness, necessitousness, privation, beggary. Poverty is a strong word, stronger than being poor; want is still stronger, indicating that one has not even the necessaries of life: indigence is often stronger than want, implying especially, also, the lack of those things to which one has been used and that befit one's station; penury is poverty that is severe to abjectness; destitution is the state of having absolutely nothing; pauperism is a poverty by which one is thrown upon public charity for support; need is a general word, definite only in suggesting the necessity for immediate relief. None of these words is limited to the lack of property, although that is naturally a prominent fact under each.

Examples

The Arabs say: '_God preserve us from overwhelming poverty; and from the company of him whom he loves not, namely, the infidel_': -- And there is a tradition of the prophet -- that '_poverty has a gloomy aspect in this world and in the next_!'"

In the United States to-day there are fifteen million8 people living in poverty; and by poverty is meant that condition in life in which, through lack of food and adequate shelter, the mere standard of working efficiency cannot be maintained.

Still, it strikes me as odd that conservatives seem so convinced that a set of countries whose populations are healthier and longer-lived, and where dramatically fewer children grow up in poverty, is somehow obviously a dystopian nightmare.

Yes... I thoroughly enjoyed it. I love the way the guys harangue and cuss at each other, but it all still sounds so civilised. Anyway, I finished it, so I'll stop inundating all these words with Crane quotations, for a while at least.

"Great heavens! Have you the temerity to get off that old nonsensical remark? Poverty is everything to be ashamed of. Did you ever see a person not ashamed of his poverty? Certainly not. Of course, when a man gets very rich he will brag so loudly of the poverty of his youth that one would never suppose that he was once ashamed of it. But he was."